I have no idea what these are actually called, but I see them all the time. The Python implementation is something like:
x += 5 as a shorthand notation for x = x + 5.
But why is this considered good ...

A lot of people claim that "comments should explain 'why', but not 'how'". Others say that "code should be self-documenting" and comments should be scarce. Robert C. Martin claims that (rephrased to ...

How would one know if the code one has created is easily readable, understandable, and maintainable? Of course from the author's point of view the code is readable and maintainable, because the author ...

I recently had a job interview in which they gave me an hour to write some real code. It wasn't a huge amount, probably less than 100 lines. After about 45 minutes, I compiled, ran it, and got it to ...

I assume that my project is decoupled enough to allow for unit testing. But how big, exactly, in terms of clases and functions does my project need to be to make unit testing worthwhile?
We all make ...

After reading the book The Pragmatic Programmer, one of the arguments I found most interesting was "write code that writes code".
I tried searching over the net for some more explanations or articles ...

I'm a beginner in programming and I've been reading books, studying, reading articles, and whatnot. I'm getting great results since I've started learning programming, and when I was a beginner I used ...

Something that I've known for a while but never considered is that in most languages it is possible to give priority to operators in an if statement based on their order. I often use this as a way to ...

I've been working as an app developer for a year and a half now (not long I know), and I've just been given my first big project.
Needless to say it didn't go very smoothly, so I sought advice from a ...

As I am currently struggling with learning WCF for a project at work, for the past several days I have been looking at online tutorials and examples on the best way to make a WCF client; and today, ...

Do you know that feeling when you just need to show off that new trick with Expressions or generalize three different procedures? This does not have to be on Architecture Astronaut scale and in fact ...

I have a debate with a programmer colleague about whether it is a good or bad practice to modify a working piece of code only to make it testable (via unit tests for example).
My opinion is that it ...

Comparing software engineering with civil engineering, I was surprised
to observe a different way of thinking: any civil engineer knows that
if you want to build a small hut in the garden you can just ...

I've got a project. In this project I wished to refactor it to add a feature, and I refactored the project to add the feature.
The problem is that when I was done, it turned out that I needed to make ...

I'm a software developer. There is a team of testers who follow and run test cases written by the analyst, but also perform exploratory testing. It seems like the testers have been competing to see ...

Let's consider something like a GUI application where main thread is updating the UI almost instantaneously, and some other thread is polling data over the network or something that is guaranteed to ...

I don't know why, but I always feel like I am "cheating" when I use reflection - maybe it is because of the performance hit I know I am taking.
Part of me says, if it is part of the language you are ...

I'm managing a small team of developers. Every so often we decide we're going to spend a day or two to clean up our code.
Would it be a good idea to schedule regular time, say 1 week every 2 months, ...

I find that some software developers are very adept at this, and often times are praised for their ability to deliver a working concept with abstract requirements. Frankly, this drives me crazy, and I ...

I am currently working for a 2 person company, as the solo primary developer. My boss gets the clients, mocks up some png design templates and hands them over to me.
This system has been working fine ...

This may or may not be a silly question, but I really would like to know the answer to something which has been bothering me for a while.
I quite often see programming examples/conventions where the ...

As a grad student, I find it more and more common for prestigious companies (like Google, Facebook, Microsoft,...) to put algorithm questions in their test and interviews. A few startups I applied to ...

I have been writing code so far in conventional text editors that come with the OS so far or use an IDE in some cases. I know there are some advanced text editors like Emacs and Vim available solely ...

As programmers I feel that our goal is to provide good abstractions on the given domain model and business logic. But where should this abstraction stop? How to make the trade-off between abstraction ...